Swimming in It

A independent commission into the failure of Australian Swimming at the Olympics reported last week and decided the team had created a 'toxic culture' for itself.

What does this mean?
Things Like this:
    James Magnuson (i don't know if that's the right spelling, and I'm not looking it up) whipping his cock out in front of younger female team members.
    Stillnox parties. Yep. That's right, stillnox parties. Where your neighbours call to get you to turn the music up.
    Red bull 'abuse'. Hi-jinx (i.e. short sheeting beds, turkey slapping each other, hitting people from behind outside bars). Late nights? (an achievement once you've gone the sillnox', racist tweets, pretending to be soldiers and taking photos of each other carrying firearms. Drinking more than one alco-pop in one sitting!

In short, the kind of brattish behaviour appropriate for a rich and spoilt 12 year old.

But why should we care? Because ultimately, in the form of new appointments, better 'services' et al ... The report recommends throwing more public money at a group of people who's one real crime, so far as I can see, is the receipt of public money. And this in a year when governments across the country have cut funding to literature, and Our Supreme Leader here in QLD cut the Premier's Awards, including the Best Emerging Author and David Unaipon Awards, which allowed young QLD authors to compete against market share monsters in order that our 'place' might have some small chance of producing it's own literary culture, thus enabling us to participate in one of chief endeavors or mankind everywhere for the last 5000 years.

I don't mind the money footballers make. It's either generated by football itself, or at worst, spreads the wealth of hobbyist billionaires a little further than would otherwise be the case. And I couldn't give a rats arse if these swimmers want to spend their inexplicable days following an underwater black line and their nights taking sleeping pills and dropping their trousers, but using public money to fund it ... Well, that's a bitch slap to every struggling artist, every person who's had to wait for a doctor or hospital bed, every student who missed out on a uni place ... and on and on

Now, I and many of my friends producing literature, something that really counts for our culture (no one remembers who the best swimmer in Tudor England was, but we all know Shakespeare) have been doing it at the mercy of market forces for up to a decade, and believe me Government, our culture is properly toxic ... I'm talking 'real' alcohol abuse - not alco--pops and redbull, whisky!, 'real' sexual profligacy - to the point of risking VD ... not the piss-ant juvenile tactics of the Australian swimming team ...

So, any funds that were earmarked to help a group of brats stay off the red bull and stillnox long enough to go splashing about in a pool for the everlasting glory of our nation (why not see who can get their swimmers on fastest, that's just as interesting)... those funds can be sent to me via the contact page on this website ... just use the subject line 'pissing it up the fucking wall' so I know that it's swimming money.